Sunday, February 26, 2017

I am not Jewish and therefore should be cautious in passing
judgement on what is “good” Judaism and what is phony. However, one need not
belong to a religion as deeply profound and tested as Judaism in order to recognize
its many virtues and values. It is on this basis alone that I, even as an
outsider, can emphatically declare that Benjamin Netanyahu is NOT Jewish and
what he seeks to create in Israel is a racist state, not a Jewish one.

To make my case, I refer to Rabbi Donniel Hartman, leader of
the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem who does speak with authority when lifting up the values and virtues of
Judaism:

Speaking of the modern state of Israel, he writes:

I am trying to save my own religion
from itself… For much of our history,
(Jews) were a powerless people and on the side of the downtrodden. Now, however,
we find ourselves in a dramatically different reality… We not only have the
ability to protect ourselves but also the power to harm others.

As such, he continues:

As the short history of Israel has
revealed, it is all too often the same people who speak in the name of religion,
who come down on the side of discrimination toward the non-Jewish national
minorities in Israel… and who campaign most vociferously against pursuing peace
with our Palestinian neighbors. (p.16)[1]

As I read Rabbi Hartman, I weep with him in the pain he
feels for the distortion of his Jewish faith in the face of modern Israel. He
writes:

One of Judaism’s central
obligations is to “not remain indifferent” (Deuteronomy 22:3), to see the needs
of others and to implicate oneself as a part of the solution. (p.20)… Moses
“chose to see the injustice around him and rejected the safer path of indifference,
and stood with those being wronged. (p.22)... We are all our neighbor’s
keepers. (p.31) …He quotes Maimonides, “Whoever is in a position to prevent
wrongdoing and does not do so, is responsible for the iniquity of all the
wrongdoing he might have prevented. (p.32)

Hartman summarized Isaiah’s message:

Your prayer and fasting are worthless
to me as long as there are hungry, poor, homeless, and naked people suffering
just outside the walls of your religious sanctuary. Get out of the synagogue
and create a society of justice. (p. 57)

Now, what does all this have to do with Benjamin Netanyahu
who doesn’t even claim to be a religious Jew?
It makes the point that his understanding of Judaism is race, not
religion. He would like for all, especially those of us living in the United
States, to think of him as “Jewish” and have a warm feeling toward him. But,
let us be clear, Netanyahu is not Jewish. He is a racist hiding behind the
smoke screen of Judaism.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Netanyahu says, “We want peace with the Palestinians but they teach their
children to hate us and to try to destroy the state of Israel.” When someone asked about the settlements,
he answered that the settlements were not an issue. It’s just that they teach
their children to hate.

Netanyahu and Trump gushed all over each other bragging
about how Israel and the US value life and live by the same moral standards.

Yet, any eye witness who visits Palestine will tell you that
settlements are the issue.

Come into my neighborhood, knock down my house, build hundreds
of Jewish only apartments on my land, surround it with Jewish only roads, keep
me boxed into a small bantustan and it would be an issue with me.

I wish just one of the reporters in the Netanyahu/Trump news
conference would have brought up the fact that Israel destroys Palestinian
homes by the hundreds, steals 80 percent of Palestinian water, has built a
separation wall, snaking down through the West Bank separating doctors from
their hospitals, farmers from their fields and children from their schools. I
wish someone would have had the integrity to ask about the number and treatment
of Palestinians, including children, in Israeli
prisons, Someone could have asked about the skunk juice sprayed on Palestinian
homes, the uprooting of Palestinian olive trees and the hundreds of check
points.

I wish someone would have asked about Israel’s bombardment with
planes and tanks and missiles from ships on the unarmed people of Gaza whom
Israel keeps locked up like animals in an open air prison. Someone should have
asked how Israel feels about the number of children who were left homeless and
with no way to fight off the freezing cold of winter. And why does Israel deliberately
limit the number of calories allowed for each person.

Netanyahu doesn’t care and Trump doesn’t have a clue. Mix
apathy with stupidity and the outlook will be grim, every time.

When those two talk about shared values, they are not
talking about my values or the values of any faithful Jew I know.

Saturday, February 4, 2017

I am not usually into football. I keep thinking that half of
the people on the globe are hungry, millions are oppressed and abused, and we
are flirting with a climate change catastrophe, so, what difference does it
make which way a ball bounces. Yet, I find myself interested in Sunday’s Super
Bowl because it includes the New England Patriots. It’s not just that the
Patriots have such a close tie with Donald Trump, but because Robert Kraft has
such a close tie to Israel.

About 20 months ago, I wrote:

If you are concerned about peace in
the middle east and seek security for Israel when the entire neighborhood is in
turmoil, if you want to avoid a needless war with Iran, (a war which we will not win), and if you are
looking for someone with great negotiating skills and experience in
understanding the needs and point of view of the other, someone with knowledge
of the region and its history, someone known for diplomacy, then, where do you
turn?

Of course, you call on professional
football players. Who better to understand what it is like to be ordinary people trying to survive
in an oppressive situation than those who grew up and continue to live in what
the news media calls a “culture of entitlement?”

Robert Kraft, ultra Zionist, and
owner of the New England Patriots led a delegation of 20 National Football
League players to Israel where they met with Benjamin Netanyahu. The Prime
Minister wanted an opportunity to explain to them why America’s effort to avoid
a war with Iran is a dumb move. It’s not
that Netanyahu himself seeks a war
with Iran where Israel would have to pay the price in lives and money, he is
clear in proclaiming that he wants the United States to go to war with Iran.
So, he chose the bright minds of the NFL to make his case. He put it in terms
that even they could understand. Call it football diplomacy.

Iran is one yard away from the goal
line. If they get nukes, the preeminent terrorist regime of our day will be
armed with nuclear weapons. Our effort
today is to make sure that we block them and push them back. That’s the
ultimate contest and the ultimate challenge, and I hope it was advanced
somewhat by this visit.[1]

“I lead my life according to the
four F’s – at least phonetically,” Kraft is often reported as having said;
“family, faith, football and philanthropy.
This trip has connected all those dots for me.”

I want to ask, which of these “dots” includes the right of
Jews to steal land from the Palestinians, kidnap and imprison their children, take
their water, blow up their homes and lock them up behind cement barrows and
barbed wire fences? Which of his four f’s justifies the past and on-going war
crimes committed by Israel every day? Mr.
Kraft needs another “F” word to connect his dots. It’s the word fairness. When
I read that wealthy professional football players are recruited to influence US policy in the Middle
East, the best “F” word to describe me is flabbergasted with an
equal measure of fear.

Football is entertainment, but when it gets involved in
foreign affairs, which causes so much pain to so many people, it is no longer
amusing. Mr. Kraft should stick to
something he knows something about for when he gets into defending Israel,
he has fumbled and somebody needs to blow the whistle on him.

William Slone Coffin said it well. “If what you think is
right causes some one else to suffer, there is something wrong with what you
think is right.”

Thomas L. Are

I preached for forty three years in the Presbyterian Church before retiring. If anyone would ever refer to me as a Liberation Theologian, I would be pleased. I started blogging several years ago to express my political and religious concern for justice, especially justice for the Palestinians.